Twitter Approves Larger Number Of Government Censorship Requests

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he campaigned with the phrase ‘free speech’ to encourage people to not be afraid to speak their minds on his platform.

At the time, most people began questioning what the CEO would do if the government, specifically from those areas where Tesla has large interests, started to make censorship requests.

Back then, Tesla was relying heavily on China for parts and sales manufacturing while it explored options to grow in different countries as well. These included Turkey and India.

However, the governments of these regions do not take well to free speech and have tried to restrict it on Twitter, as well as other platforms.

This has led to the two parties being at odds on various occasions in the past.

On the other hand, Musk decided to take a different approach to this matter and complied with any and every request made by the government of these regions for censorship.

A recent report also revealed that the micro-blogging website is more compliant with government censorship requests now more than ever under the leadership of Musk.

Figures on the matter revealed that the company has received no less than 971 censorship requests from governments, which is significantly more than the figure of 338 reported from the time period of October of 2021 to April of 2022.

Before the CEO of Tesla took control of Twitter, the leadership only accepted 50% of censorship requests, which complied with the statistics reported in the company’s previous transparency report.

On the other hand, ever since the ownership changed hands, the percentage of censorship requests being accepted has shot to 83%.

When questioned about this figure, Musk stated that the micro-blogging website does not have much choice when it comes to complying with such requests.

This is because each region has different laws, and according to him, Twitter is a platform that will abide by all laws to maintain a good relationship.

But it was also noted that Twitter would hold its own when such censorship requests were made in the past.

Back in June of 2022, the Indian Government requested the platform to remove or ban a bunch of profiles linked to Pakistan. This was because of ongoing government dissent at the time.

The matter was dragged to court, where the leadership of the social media platform contested these bans. This led to a conflict with the government of India, and the app faced the risk of being banned in the region.

However, Twitter is used to being threatened in this manner, especially when it would downright refuse to give in to the requests being made by the Indian Government.

Back in 2014, Turkey banned Twitter for a while when the platform did not cede to any censorship requests made back then.

But since the micro-blogging website did not give in, the government of the region took to establishing laws which restricted the content that people could and could not publish.